In June of 2007, 7 friends left the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia on a trip to Nepal. Our mission was to deliver a painting of an amazing man in a remote village which sits at 12,000 feet in the Himalayas. The film that documents this cultural exchange is now finished, and in the summer of 2010, it was carried back to Nepal and shown there. The film premiered in the US on September 16 at the Taubman Museum in Roanoke before beginning a new journey around the country.

Upcoming Shows

We've been named as a official selection in the Southern Circuit of Filmmakers Tour, March 17-24.Shows are in Hapeville, GA 3/17, Madison, GA 3/20, Orangeburg, SC 3/22, Gainsville, GA 3/23, and Manteo, NC 3/24.Learn more by going to the SouthArts blog.

View the theatrical trailer for A Gift for the Village

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Incredible time in the heartland of America - from Tom

Thanks so much to the kind people at Roberts Park United Methodist Church in downtown Indianapolis. Friday, November 11 was a great day to be a local boy returning home. My high school, Lawrence North High, was brave to extend an invitation to talk to students from the theater, journalism, and video production programs there, so I delivered a short talk on my "career" in television and discussed the production of A Gift for the Village. The kids were great, and I admit to getting a little choked up just as I started my talk, and looked up at the crowd of about 200 students in the Little Theater, where I'd done quite a bit of singing and acting as a kid.

It was at that high school where I saw my first video camera: a thing so bulky that you had to wheel a cart around with it to contain the giant recorder and all of the electronics needed to make it work, and the arts teachers there taught me a lot of things I still use every day: how to speak extemporaneously, how to work as a part of a team to produce professional quality work, and how to evaluate your own work to continuously improve. I was honored that my best childhood friend John Klasing came to the talk, and he chimed in a few times with good suggestions of stories to share with the kids.

Then, that night we showed the film to a group of about 120 people, many of whom were old friends from my childhood church and high school pals and people I'd never met who heard about the show. I was honored that two Tibetans we'd met during my visit to Indy showed up to see the movie: they said that they only knew of 6 Tibetans in the whole city, and I hope they enjoyed seeing familiar scenes on the screen. The projection equipment and screen were provided by the people from the Heartland Film Festival, and the film looked great because of it.